NEW YORK: A few days before it was announced that a former professor at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx was giving the school $1 billion to ensure free tuition pretty much forever, came word of another significant donation, though one not nearly as astonishing in sum or association. Julia Koch, one of the richest women in the world, was giving $75 million to a medical centre in West Palm Beach, which, as The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted, serves “one of Florida’s fastest-growing wealthy enclaves.”
Giving to hospitals in places where someone may have a second or fifth house is a favoured cause of the rich. This facility will be called Julia Koch Family Ambulatory Care Centre.
The Einstein gift, which came from a 93-year-old woman named Ruth Gottesman, is remarkable not only for its size but also for the absence of any apparent vanity surrounding it, the fortune having been quietly made by her husband, to whom she was married for 72 years. David Gottesman,a protege of Warren Buffett, had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Buffett built. He was not a creature of Page Six or TV, of divorce settlements, $500 million yachts, Davos or social-media diatribes.
As the billionaire class has grown, modern philanthropy has become more extravagant in tandem with the egos and expectations driving it, a cry for the kind of political and social influence to which the Gottesmans seemed so pleasingly indifferent. “He left me, unbeknownst to me, a whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock,” Ruth said. The instructions were simple: “Do whatever you think is right with it,” she recalled.
The Einstein gift is the third-largest ever made to an institution of higher learning. (Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins, his alma mater, leads the list.) Einstein will not displace its namesake to be called Ruth Gottesman College of Medicine, nor does its benefactor seem to be demanding any other form of grand institutional deference. Ruth has been involved with the school for more than 55 years. What she noticed was the gristle – how tough it was to leave school burdened with the kind of debt a $59,000 a year tuition can carry. Nearly half of all students at Einstein owe $200,000 or more when they leave.
The cost of a medical education is one major factor driving the doctor shortage that Jesse M Ehrenfeld, president of American Medical Association, has called a national crisis. The hope of a gift like Gottesman’s is that it gives students the freedom not to choose neck lifts – that it provides the opportunity to stay in a place like the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, and give care where it is needed. And there is another hope too: that it broadcasts a message of how a billionaire might live his or her best life – without terraforming Mars, without Burning Man, without the attempts to stealth-run Harvard University.
Giving to hospitals in places where someone may have a second or fifth house is a favoured cause of the rich. This facility will be called Julia Koch Family Ambulatory Care Centre.
The Einstein gift, which came from a 93-year-old woman named Ruth Gottesman, is remarkable not only for its size but also for the absence of any apparent vanity surrounding it, the fortune having been quietly made by her husband, to whom she was married for 72 years. David Gottesman,a protege of Warren Buffett, had made an early investment in Berkshire Hathaway, the conglomerate Buffett built. He was not a creature of Page Six or TV, of divorce settlements, $500 million yachts, Davos or social-media diatribes.
As the billionaire class has grown, modern philanthropy has become more extravagant in tandem with the egos and expectations driving it, a cry for the kind of political and social influence to which the Gottesmans seemed so pleasingly indifferent. “He left me, unbeknownst to me, a whole portfolio of Berkshire Hathaway stock,” Ruth said. The instructions were simple: “Do whatever you think is right with it,” she recalled.
The Einstein gift is the third-largest ever made to an institution of higher learning. (Michael Bloomberg’s $1.8 billion to Johns Hopkins, his alma mater, leads the list.) Einstein will not displace its namesake to be called Ruth Gottesman College of Medicine, nor does its benefactor seem to be demanding any other form of grand institutional deference. Ruth has been involved with the school for more than 55 years. What she noticed was the gristle – how tough it was to leave school burdened with the kind of debt a $59,000 a year tuition can carry. Nearly half of all students at Einstein owe $200,000 or more when they leave.
The cost of a medical education is one major factor driving the doctor shortage that Jesse M Ehrenfeld, president of American Medical Association, has called a national crisis. The hope of a gift like Gottesman’s is that it gives students the freedom not to choose neck lifts – that it provides the opportunity to stay in a place like the Bronx, the city’s poorest borough, and give care where it is needed. And there is another hope too: that it broadcasts a message of how a billionaire might live his or her best life – without terraforming Mars, without Burning Man, without the attempts to stealth-run Harvard University.
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